Ok, I’m gonna back up a step, explain a few basics about Follow Actions and cover a few details that you might not know, even if you’re familiar with this technology…
The first thing to know is that Follow Actions apply to a group of clips. A group is simply a set of adjacent clips in a single track. You can have multiple groups in a track – just leave an empty slot in between them.
In the example from the prior tips, the follow action settings for the clip look like this:
In english: “One sixteenth note after this clip is launched, a random clip in the current group will be launched.”
Another example:
In english: “Three bars after this clip is launched, the next clip down in the current group will be launched.”
If the clip is a one bar loop, that means it will repeat three times before the next clip plays. Bear in mind, however, that this Follow Action also works even if the clip is a one shot and is shorter than three bars. The Follow Action is completely independant of the length of the clip.
Most of the actions in the menu are pretty self explanitory. For randomness, you have two choices: Any and Other.
The difference here is that Any is a true random choice in that it includes the clip that’s currently playing as a possible choice, whereas Other excludes the currently playing clip. That means that, strictly speaking, Other is less random, but it results in greater variation, because a different clip is always chosen when the action executes.
What makes follow actions really interesting is the fact that there are two possible actions (Action A and Action B). So far we’ve just been looking at one of them.
To get the second action into the mix, you need to specify the Chance that it will occur. Chance is represented by the numeric ratio below the two action menus. To specify a 50% chance of either action, you’d set both Chance A and Chance B to 1. So this…
…means: “One bar after this clip is launched, flip a coin. If it’s heads, launch the next clip in the group. If it’s tails, stop playpack.”
By adjusting the Chance values, you can get very specific about the relative probability of either action occuring.
Warping without looping.
